The New World of Martin Cortes

The New World of Martin Cortes

Martin Cortes was the illegitimate son of the conquistador Hernan Cortes and the indigenous American woman who translated for him - the legendary Malinche. Martin was born into a new world, when Europeans were discovering theirs was not the only world - a time of hybridity, when cultures were transplanted and new mixtures of races began, when globalisation first became a possibility. Martin's destiny was to cross these worlds in many ways. Taken from his mother as an infant (shades of Australia's 'stolen children'), he was raised in Cuba by paternal relatives. At six he went to Spain with his father, to become a page in the service of the Spanish prince, eventually accompanying him to England in 1555 for Mary Tudor's wedding. Later Martin fought as a soldier of Spain in Germany, France and Algeria, yet was ultimately fated to resist the Spanish Crown, and to die far from anywhere he might call home. Ten years after Martin's birth, Hernan Cortes had his first legitimate child by his aristocratic Spanish wife, whom he also named Martin Cortes, after his own father - and so a bewildering riddle of identity ensued for future historians. To later Mexicans the story of